The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist: A Chat With the Curator of Locarno’s Timely Retrospective for the Age of Trump & Co.

The retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival feels particularly timely, maybe even scarily so. Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist promises to put the spotlight on “one of the most turbulent and politically charged periods in the history of American cinema,” including the “Red Scare” and the infamous Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy era.

After all, during the period from 1947 to the early 1960s, Hollywood professionals suspected of communist ties faced a crackdown. The Swiss festival’s cinematic look back will provide “a complex portrait of an era in which creatives were confronted by unprecedented abuse of state and industry power and which they met, courageously, with fierce artistic resistance,” Locarno highlighted. Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist will “re-examine this repressive yet defiantly creative era, which mirrors the political attacks on free speech and artistic freedom seen again today.”

Produced in partnership with the Cinémathèque Suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Locarno retrospective was once again curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht. He has compiled a program of more than 50 films – fiction, documentaries, and shorts – and newsreels featuring such directors, writers, and stars as John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, and Charlie Chaplin. It will explore various works to shine a spotlight on a time of polarized politics, allegations of communist infiltration of Hollywood in the Cold War, and the Hollywood blacklist that upended careers and forced artists to adopt pseudonyms or go into exile overseas.Among the films featured in the retrospective are the likes of Lewis Milestone’s The North Star (1943), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), directed by Clifford Odets, Crossfire (1947) from director Edward Dmytryk, Bernard Vorhaus’ Amazing Mr X (1948), Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), The Sound of Fury (1950), directed by Cy Endfield, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), Charlie Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957), Hollywood on Trial (1976) by David Helpern, Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) with Woody Allen, and 1996’s Red Hollywood, directed by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch. The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs Aug. 5-15. 

Khoshbakht talked to THR about Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist, why it is “the timeliest” retrospective he has ever worked on, Hollywood’s role today, and the role of Charlie Chaplin and other stars in the showcase.

Have you been working on this retrospective for Locarno for a long time, and how easy was the decision that the time was ripe for it?I had this project lined up for the future because it needed some proper research, but all of a sudden, I thought it was for now, because it’s about what’s happening right now. Even some of the terminology from back then is back in use. For instance, if you see press releases from the White House, there are some headlines with phrases that come right out of the McCarthy playbook, which is quite astonishing. They mention “the radical Left” and “radical propaganda,” among other things.

But what is so interesting is that now both Left and Right, and the Center, have appropriated the terminology of that era to their own advantage. For instance, there was this Wall Street Journal headline saying basically: “McCarthyism is back – this time it’s woke.” So you can define McCarthyism as well, either as woke or anti-woke is McCarthyism. It’s just this confusion about the meaning of words and phrases that, back in the day, at least had some clear meaning – most of it completely wrong, but they were used in a very specific way.

Curating retrospectives takes a lot of work and research. Can you share some insight into how long you researched this topic and these films?

I had seen almost all of the films, so I knew my films, and that’s the most important part. But this is one of those subjects that comes with hundreds of books, and new books are being published every year. So, you want to catch up with the literature. There is also some other really interesting stuff, such as the declassified FBI files. That makes it far more exciting to dive into this episode in the history of American cinema.

There are also the oral histories and books that the victims of the blacklist, especially The Hollywood Ten, wrote from the late ’70s onwards about their own experience. There are contradictions, there are paradoxes, I guess a bit of egocentrism, but when you put them together with the rest, it gives you a relatively accurate picture of how things unfolded from ’47 onwards.

I love the title you guys picked for the retrospective, Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist. How long did you think about what to call this showcase?

Many good titles have been used by writers of books. One of those titles I love very much is Tender Comrades[: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist]. I thought the title should make clear that this is about not one subject, but actually two subjects. One is red, and one is black. Red is a reference to the Hollywood Left, which was active before the blacklist was introduced in 1947, and then black is for the blacklist. This is a program that actually studies the journey of the Hollywood Left from the early ’40s until the late ’60s.

When Locarno unveiled this latest retrospective, you said this is the most timely retrospective you have put together. This is your third one for the Locarno festival, but you have done so much other work. How is this one different?

It is my most timely retrospective so far, and it is something very special. The fact that we are talking about this is also special, because, sadly, The Hollywood Reporter was one of the key players in the blacklist episode, playing the role of a cheerleader for the FBI and for the [House of Representatives’ investigative committee known as the] House Un-American Activities Committee.

If you asked me, if you put a gun to my head, why the blacklist happened, and I had to give you only one reason, I would tell you that it happened because of the union wars, because writers were successful in establishing the Screen Writers Guild, which Hollywood disliked very much, and which The Hollywood Reporter disliked. They didn’t want the writers to be powerful. The Hollywood Reporter didn’t miss any chance to attack the writers who were involved in the foundation of the Screen Writers Guild to the extent that in its reviews, when listing the cast and crew, it refused to list the name of the writer of the film, if it was someone like Dalton Trumbo. Some of these writers were making big money for Hollywood, like Trumbo, for instance, who was very well paid, and Ring Lardner Jr.

In an attack directed at Lester Cole, they even published a front-page editorial by the editor of The Hollywood Reporter. And in that editorial, they mentioned his Communist Party membership number, which was secret information that even Cole didn’t have, because you didn’t really need that number. But the FBI had some spies in the Communist Party, and they had stolen that information, and that information was used. But it was not just The Hollywood Reporter. You had Catholic groups and others also campaigning behind the scenes.

You have mentioned Trumbo and others. Some of the other faces and names that audiences will come across in the retrospective include the likes of John Garfield, Dorothy Parker and Charlie Chaplin. Can you talk about some of the big names and what roles they played?

We have three different groups. One group is non-Americans, such as [German playwright] Bertolt Brecht, who testified [before the House Un-American Activities Committee], and the day after, he left the country for good. Otherwise, it would have been the Hollywood Eleven instead of The Hollywood Ten. But they couldn’t do much with him anyway because Brecht was not American, so the best they could have done was to deport him. But he was clever and said to hell with you, I’m going to go back home.

Chaplin falls into that same category, because Chaplin was also not an American citizen. He was a British citizen. But the case with Chaplin is so unbelievably complex. Chaplin, even before the Communist Party of America started to gain more membership, was the subject of FBI surveillance. There are extensive records of him, and we are going to publish some of them in the book. They followed every movement of this man, because they were so afraid of him, in a sense, because he was perhaps the most popular and the most recognizable human figure on Earth. And he was very progressive.

America was neutral at the beginning of the war, and the America First groups wanted to stay out of the war, but Chaplin, being British, was actively campaigning for the war. And then when America entered the war, Chaplin was campaigning for the Soviet allies, because that’s what President Roosevelt asked people to do to promote goodwill, because the U.S. needed the Soviets, and without them, they wouldn’t be able to win this war. And he was, you know, logistically, technically, absolutely right. So, so you have this group of non-Americans, and Chaplin is the most extreme case. The obsession with Chaplin, the anti-Semitic stories being circulated by the Hearst Media and the FBI about this man. Everything about him is so complex.